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Everything posted by Malaphax

Slight update to the low profile brown switch struggle that kuhla has been facing.
Keychron K1 now comes in brown, reasonably priced wireless bluetooth TKL at $70 for white backlight and $80 for full RGB
THIS IS A "PREORDER" and it ships June 10th
https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-k1-wireless-mechanical-keyboard?variant=31871561695321
Hexgears Venture, fullsized wireless bluetooth and full RGB for $130
https://kono.store/collections/all-products-list/products/venture-mechanical-keyboard?variant=29416531820627
And if for some reason you wanted to use a 96% style layout that seems to be made by someone who's never actually used a keyboard before you can try out this monstrosity:
https://kono.store/collections/all-products-list/products/hexgears-x-1-mechanical-keyboard

I'm personally using these pages:
Ford: https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=f
Tesla: https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=tsla
I showed my calculations, Insider + Institutional - Total = ~Individual / Retail. While I'm not entirely certain, I suspect that employee pensions make up the bulk of Ford's 50% "individual / retail" holding in my calculations and that the 1% number from cnn business is referencing insiders.
In general, most stocks are majority held by institutional investors, sometimes as individual positions but more often as part of various investment products like ETFs and Mutual Funds. Tesla most likely has an outsized "retail" ownership, I suspect that's partly because of the people who are excited about the company, and also due to the potential growth / volatility. I just wanted to show that Ford, technically has a larger individual percentage ownership, I again suspect it's predominantly held by their pension fund or UAW. Same with GM. I'm also not sure what percentage of TSLA employees receive stock grants, options, etc. and if that also makes up a decent percentage of the 30% retail ownership.
Honestly the largest difference between Tesla and Ford/GM is not the retail investor space, but the insider ownership percentage - Musk owns a shitload of Tesla, and in that sense the company's ownership structure is much closer to Amazon or Google, where owners/founders hold large positions (although that gets weird when you look at different classes of stock). People sometimes refer to Tesla as behaving more like a tech stock than an auto manufacturer and while I think it's true they offer more than simple auto manufacturing, most of their products still remain physical goods and in that sense they're substantially different from many tech stocks.

Again, I think the lighthouse setups can be better, but as you mentioned, they require more work, and if you're looking to take advantage of full body tracking with a lighthouse setup, you're going to need more than 2 lighthouse units. The inside out tracking is really good, and performs way above what my personal expectations are - in the video I posted comparing the index to the lenovo WMR, you can see he tests how accurate the tracking is even when moving the controllers behind his head, and it still performs well.
Also as you mentioned the additional setup needed for lighthouse style tracking is substantial, not just extra cables and mounting but having to dedicate a play space to VR.
The controllers on the other hand... clearly the standard style WMR controllers aren't great, aside from no finger tracking they also do prevent certain movements due to the bulky tracking units on the top. The classic example being trying to rack the slide on a pistol in half life alyx - you end up smashing controllers together trying to complete the motion, but the index's knuckles don't have that limitation - of course they are $280 separately which is more expense than some low end VR setups, especially when they're on sale.
Again, I feel like we're still in the early generations of VR, and we'll probably see improvements over the next 2-3 years, and hopefully some additional VR games that take advantage of a growing VR segment.

Popularity is sorta true, but on paper they don't have a significantly larger retail investor presence than even other auto manufacturers.
TSLA - Insider 20.51% + Institutional 51.5% = ~30% retail investors
F - Insider 0.1% + Institutional 52.6% = ~50% retail investors
GM - Insider 0.2% + Institutional 77.9% = ~23% retail investors (This is a more traditional S&P500 equity ownership)
Of course that leads to your second point, which is that Tesla isn't strictly an auto manufacturer, which I would agree with. They still sell substantially lower numbers of vehicles than most auto manufacturers, but they also see a healthy demand - shown by some of their wait lists. I agree Tesla is more similar to Amazon in the sense that they're willing to push into new/different business areas with some competence, but unlike Amazon they haven't really shown the ability to produce sustainable revenue. They're also notorious for missing deadlines, missing revenue guidance and that's before we even touch Elon's general weirdness.

I doubt that's going to happen any time soon. Honestly the knuckles controllers seem to be the best feature of the index. I think the lighthouse tracking is a better solution in theory, but I've seen some rather odd issues present even when you add lighthouse units to try and go for full body tracking - see example.

I tried to simplify this, but I'm not sure I succeeded.
Stuff we're agreed on:
Warzone / Apex - We're all sorta ok with these
Overwatch - we're all ok with trying this again. I guess I should install it
Deep Rock Galactic - we're ok with this for co-op
Stuff we're mixed on:
Titanfall 2 - kuhla and I like this, Tino prefers modern warfare
Battlefield 1, 4, 5 - kuhla isn't super thrilled, Tino prefers 5, I prefer 4
Battlefront 2 - Tino and I like this, kuhla hates it
Valorant / CS:GO - Tino's ok, kuhla wants to try and I'm not a fan
Division 2 - Tino likes this, kuhla's ok with this, I'm not really interested - richard also plays this
Rainbow 6 - Tino love this, kuhla and I, not so much
Other Options mentioned:
Killing Floor 2 - I'd be willing to buy and try this if it goes on sale. Alternatively Left4Dead 2, although I'm fairly certain I would need to buy this.
Heroes of the Storm - I know you guys aren't much into RTS/MOBA games but I'd actually recommend this one since it's more team focused. It's free.
GTA 5 - I think we all picked this up for free from epic? Idk, I'm not super interested but I guess I'd be up for trying it.
Throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks
Monster Hunter World - Some progression light RPG mechanics, could be fun as a group to hunt big monsters.
Mortal Kombat 11 - I've heard it's good, I guess I'd be ok with trying this - downside is that it's 1v1 and we'd probably need lobbies to rotate who's playing.

We've been sort of in a rut regarding games we're interested in playing recently so I'm posting some ideas and suggestions, please feel free to contribute.
Warzone - I'm fine with playing this sometimes but I'm not really a battle royale person
Apex Legends - see above
Battlefield 4 (or 1) - We're not getting a new battlefield for a while, I'm fine with revisiting the older games, Not sure how reliable these stats are but it's something: https://battlefield.agency/
Titanfall 2 - I love this game, I'm always down to play it.
Overwatch - I guess I'm alright going back to this for a while.
Star Wars Battlefront 2 - I kinda like this game but I know kuhla hates it
Deep Rock Galactic - I enjoy this, the co-op focus is a nice break from multiplayer.
Vermintide 2 - Another co-op game for a change of pace - currently $7.49
League of Legends or Dota 2 - I doubt anyone's interested, but they're a non-FPS option. Slightly better option for that would probably be Heroes of the Storm.
(Dis)Honorable Mentions
Destiny 2 - I'm sorta done with this game, I'll need serious convincing to get back into it, I'll be holding off buying any season passes or expansions until I see what it looks like 2+ weeks after they release.
Valorant - I'm not really interested in playing this (or CS:GO) I might suffer through a few matches when it launches if we all want to play it together, but it's really not my style.
Guild Wars 2 - I have a hard time picturing what we could all do together, there's some new content (mostly singleplayer) but I don't think it's a good option, even if I'd like an RPG to dive into.
Honestly, I'm fairly open to ideas and I'm willing to try new games - especially if they're free or cheap. We also have the steam summer sale coming up so if there's something that looks moderately interesting and it's fairly cheap, I'm willing to buy in and give it a chance.

There are some stocks I consider outside of the normal rules of modern portfolio theory, Tesla is one of them. For better or worse, that company is traded less on actual financial reporting and more on emotion or nebulous future predictions. Every stock has a certain amount of forward looking projection built into their current prices, but TSLA seems like one of the extremes.

I've been incredibly wary of early access, and in general avoided any purchases of early access games, but some have been very successful - we all own Deep Rock Galactic and that was early access, although we all purchased it within a few months of a full release.
With "live service" style games, you can see massive changes over time, but you need an initial interest (or a very determined developer - like ubisoft's r6 siege or for honor) to carry the player population while you make changes. I don't think Crucible is going to be the next league of legends or fortnite, but I think plenty of developers see those games as examples of releasing relatively sparse products that matured over many years and think "why can't we do that, just put out a alpha / early access and we'll keep polishing it until it's really good" But games are very hit and miss. Also when you're not the first, you need to release a more polished product - in this case, I don't think Crucible is the "first" in any of their game modes, so they're going to be compared to more mature products and it doesn't come across well.

They're also running into issue of map size vs character speed. If you look at dota 2 vs league of legends, dota 2 has a larger map, but characters move faster, league has a smaller map but slower characters. Crucible has a goddamn huge map, because it's the same map for all game modes, which means the 4v4 mode feels like you're slogging through empty space. You also have huge differences in character mobility - earl can jet across half the map with a single skill, but some characters have little to no extra mobility. I generally dislike the idea of mounts or out of combat movement speed boosts but that's one other way of having a large map and "slower" movement speed units.
I think I want to try the 8v8 mode to see how silly that is.
I feel like this game is clearly a situation where developers are releasing an alpha / early access but none of the marketing (little that there is) mentions this as anything other than a full release. The different game modes seem like they're trying to just figure out what's popular and then push more resources towards that, but I'm not sure that's a great way of launching a game.

Initial impressions.
Visuals - mostly ok, but it's not particularly optimized. Spawning in absolutely dumpsters the framerate.
Character Balance - Absolute garbage, some characters seem super weak and others seem way too strong. Melee in particular feels weightless and terrible.
Game systems - The respawn system is really odd, death timers are slow and then you combine it with a 10 second animation for respawning in. Seems like death is super punishing.
The heart of the hive mechanic seems all over the place, you have creeps you can farm, you have mini-objectives like capturing barrels of essence, you have towers you can capture that give essence over time and then you have the actual main objective of killing the hive and capturing the heart. That's plenty of game mechanics and there's very little indication of what all of them are doing. You can't see what level the enemy team is, what the scoreboard is (unless you're dead) or what your essence income is.
Overall this seems like a huge mess of systems that don't mesh very well together and the very mediocre UI isn't doing them any favors.
The map is a bit of a mess, and the npc spawns seem all over the place.
Lack of consistent healing, you initially spawn in with medkits but they don't refill on respawn. Medkits don't seem to have consistent capture points. The medical stations near harvesters are slow, and can be used by enemies. Seems like a better system would be to allow medkits to be captured by the team that owns the harvester. Also no idea why Earl has healing. There seems to be a few abilities for shielding allies but not healing them, they need more sources of damage mitigation.
I'm willing play more, just to try it out, but I'm not particularly impressed.

Sorta boring but important news. Recently Doom Eternal added Denuvo: Anti-Cheat (they forgot to add in the copy protection at launch so it was already available to pirates).
Their logic was that they wanted to prevent cheating... in a predominantly singleplayer game. There were also reports that performance took a hit (which is supposedly unrelated), and that as usual anti-cheat was running on ring-0.
Putting such onerous anti-cheat on a mostly single player game was pushing too far. Luckily the devs (and their PR team) saw the outrage and decided it wasn't worth it so they're removing the anti-cheat in the next patch.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/gnjlo7/latest_information_on_update_1_anticheat/

The original was heavily reshot, not quite as bad as Solo: A Star Wars story, but pretty bad. Snyder had to deal with his daughter's suicide and basically bailed on the film to handle his personal shit (understandable). I suspect that the "snyder cut" is either incomplete and/or a desperate ploy to get people to give a shit about the justice league considering wonder woman 2 is on hold until theaters reopen.
I personally enjoyed snyder's superman movies, I enjoyed the darker tones and didn't mind seeing superman question himself. There was a director's cut of batman v superman which I found better than the theatrical version (it filled in some gaps), but I doubt the justice league film can be saved in the edit.

There's a 4v4 mode where you kill NPCs and capture neutral objectives.
There's a battle royale with 2 player teams (8 teams or 16 total players), the gimmick is that if you lose your squadmate you can create a temporary alliance and break that alliance at any point. This gimmick seems more focused on singleplayer than team oriented.
There's an 8v8 conquest / control point mode, cap and hold points to secure victory.
The character customization appears to be done outside of the match, so you pick what leveling up will do to your character in advance. This seems similar to the way league of legends does their Rune choices. It also looks like you start with all character abilities so "ultimates" from other Moba style games are less of a power spike that players reach and more of a big move with a long cooldown, it also looks like some characters don't really have traditional ultimates and just an array of moves they use.

As a note, Intel quotes the 10900X as 125W TDP. What that does not take into account is the boost clock of 5.3ghz which can be active for up to 1 minute and the boost clock draws 250W TDP. That makes air cooling this thing nearly impossible, even with a really good air cooler like the dark rock 4 it reaches 94C under extended load. That's way too hot to handle, and with a 240mm CLC you're still looking at 78C, I suspect it would be higher if there wasn't a 1 minute limit on the boost clock.
Honestly, this 10000 series looks like utter shit, it's priced relatively competitively (hey wonder why that is) but the performance isn't particularly impressive. Combined with absolute garbage thermals and crazy power draw that's just not reasonable.
I really hope this was Intel's last 14nm++++++ release, because clearly they're hitting a wall trying to cram in more cores and higher clocks.
https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/intel_core_i9_10900k_processor_review,30.html